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Details the key role of employees in improving customer loyalty at Discount Bank, Israel.

Explains why strategic change was needed at the bank and how its management settled on the concept of direct banking relationships as the foundation for the reforms.

Describes the three levels of loyalty that managers identified – first creating good feelings toward the bank, then moving towards satisfied and finally appreciative clients – and explains the steps that managers took to achieve these levels of loyalty in practice.

Reveals that the strategy helped the bank to recruit more than 300,000 new customers in three years.

Highlights how service organizations can benefit from drawing customers into a close relationship with their employees.

Claims that direct banking relationships are new in the financial‐services sector.

The purpose of this study is to define the tasks of product managers from the perspective of professional brand managers and to point out the gaps between their short‐ and long‐term tasks.

The paper conducted two studies: the first utilized a focus group in order to define the tasks of brand managers. In the second study, 58 brand managers were interviewed using in‐depth interviews in order to define the various factors of each of the nine branding aspects. In the second phase of the second study, the participants were asked to point out gaps between the brand managers' long‐ and short‐term perspectives.

The findings indicate that the daily pressure on brand managers comes from the distributors, who are the decisive factor in the threefold connection (manufacturer‐distributor‐consumer) due to their strong position in the market and the ongoing requirement to learn from and to satisfy them significantly more than the competition.

The implications of the study to the brand managers' approach is that they should nurture relationships with consumers, perform more frequent market segmentations in order to identify new needs, and consequently reduce the distributors' power.

The importance of this research is that it provides a new definition for brand managers' tasks and copes with the real gaps between the short‐term and the long‐term perspectives of brand management, and as such supplies substantial qualitative data for better decision making in accordance with the twenty‐first century challenges of the brand managers.